Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 62, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 April 1907 — A TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE. [ARTICLE]

A TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE.

The Indiana Supreme Court has jn§t added one more to the long line of decisions which tend to bring laws and courts into the contempt of the people and to make immane the perpetration of crime. Jim Gillespie, of Rising Sun, Indiana, convicted after one of the longest and hardest and most expensive trials ever held in in Indiana, of having cruelly murdered his own twin sister, moved thereto by the selfish spite of an ingrate and spendthrifts and convicted by a chain of evidence which left no shadow of donbt as to his guilt, has been freed by the court, after serving a year or so of the life sentence imposed upon him for the crime. This Supreme Court had no fault to find with the evidence under which he Was convicted, and raised no question as to the fairness of his trial, but based its travesty of justice on a most contemptible technicality and quibble of the law. After a full jury had been accepted and sworn in, but before any further steps had been taken, the attorneys for the state discovered that one of the jurors was distantly related to the accused, by marriage, and they peremptorily challenged that juror, and obtained another. The supreme court took the view that when this jury was first sworn in, the prisoner was thereby placed in jeopardy, and when the completed jury was sworn a second time, that was patting him in jeopardy twice for the same offense, and nence against the constitution of state and nation. The simple act of stopping the trial before it had begun, was considered an acquittnl and the court now orders that it have that effect, and Gillespie has been released from prison, and his infernal crime retrains forever unpunished. How absurd this rule of the supreme court is, is illustrated by the rule which applies vhen a man is tried and the jury fails to agree or is discharged because oue of them dies or becomes sick. In either of those cases he has really been ome put in jeopardy, yet under the law and rules of the court, he can be again placed on trial, for the same offense Yet in this Gillespie case, when not a single step had been taken in the actual trial of the case, the swearing in of the jury is made by the supreme court to count as a complete trial, and its interruption to replace a juror is counted as an acquittal of the prisoner. What a travesty of justice! And what wonder that the Unit ed States has ten times as many murders in proportion to population, as any other civilized Dation on the earth! And what wonder that people resort to lynching when their courts protect murderers by such decisions as this.